They have the capacity to spot and catch the smallest creatures but they can't see the elephant in the room, as they go about in the guise of National Accountability Bureau (NAB). It has arrested three officials of the Private Power Infrastructure Board (PPIB) for their alleged role in 'causing a huge financial loss to the national exchequer' in the Karkey Rental Power Plant deal. The NAB has been working on this case for over two years now, and has reached the conclusion that none else but these three pocketed Rs 22 billion. How credulous we the people are who believe how come the petty officials in government departments can make billions at the back of their political bosses. For months and years the impression prevailed that prime ministers Yousuf Raza Gilani and Raja Pervez Ashraf, the latter also known as 'Raja Rental', had not 'washed their hands in this flowing Ganga'. And, big guns like cabinet ministers and federal secretaries and few other top functionaries remain untouched by the NAB. One of the arrested, Managing Director Noorul Ameen must be a real simpleton, when they came for him, he was in his office, working. But that said, there is a problem - the people refuse to the RPP saga through the NAB lens; they ask how come the NAB refuses to see the elephant in the room. While the small men have been nabbed the major players are free. At the time scandalous rental power plants deals were made and hefty advances were made Raja Pervez Ashraf was the in charge of the water and power ministry.
That an investigating agency with scores of extra intelligent officers as the National Accountability Bureau is, one would tend to think there must be some compelling reason behind its arrest of three PPIB officials. Maybe, someone in the Bureau decided to embarrass Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by ordering these arrests on the eve of ground-breaking ceremony for a 1320-megawatt power project - who knows. But it is more likely that the arrests were planned as diversion from the reality of the 'cruel summer' that the Water and Power Minister Khawaja Asif has projected for the countrymen. With no detectable turnaround in ubiquitous loud-shedding over the year to which the incumbent rulers were committed somebody had to invent a deflector, and these arrests pass that test. The failure buck has been passed on the previous PPP government which signed up almost a score of rental power deals. The message is: don't ask the present rulers when the loadshedding spells are longer now than ever before; blame the ones who signed the dubious RPP deals. To the extent that RPP scam is the legacy of PPP government that's right, but why then the big fish is not being arrested. Faisal Saleh Hayat had raised this issue in the National Assembly and also later took it to the Supreme Court. Before the reputation of honest, hardworking officials of the PPIB is tarnished beyond redemption, we hope the NAB would like to apprise the people as why it failed to spot the elephant in the room. Such an act will help restore its image as the country's top white-collar crime investigator.
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